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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26655124">Reunion</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture'>lovetincture</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Shape of Light [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Season/Series 01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 10:41:04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,001</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26655124</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean reunite when John goes missing. There's a lot left unsaid between them.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Mentioned Dean Winchester/John Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The Shape of Light [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1843720</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Reunion</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The thing Dean had with Dad—it was good while he had it, the thing he couldn’t talk about, couldn’t name (couldn’t stop hating himself for). He and Dad hunted together, until they started hunting apart. It started easy, a job here and a job there. There were two of them and two cars, once Dad got the truck—they could cover more ground this way. Save more lives.</p><p>(Dad could avoid him)</p><p>They were connected through a phone line, Dad would call and give him tips on jobs in other cities. Dean would go where he was needed, shotgun in hand.</p><p>(The Impala wasn’t an apology; it wasn’t a bribe. It <em>wasn’t)</em></p><p>It was normal to go a week or more without talking to each other. Jobs ran long, bled into other jobs. Cell phones got destroyed by water or blood or sheer blunt force. There were monsters to gank. Occasionally, there were cops to lose. It was <em>normal,</em> it was—</p><p>One week was normal. Two was a problem.</p><p>Dean called and called, and he got nothing but an answering machine. He called and called, and he felt rudderless in the ocean.</p><p>* * *</p><p>Dean expected that the first time he saw Sam again would feel like manna in the desert. It’s been years. Actual years. If you’d asked him at eighteen, he’d have told you that he wasn’t sure they could survive the distance.</p><p>Because the thing is, it feels less like missing a brother and more like missing a limb. It still does, each and every time. It feels like knowing that part of you is going to sleep somewhere in another city, in another state—it’s utterly bizarre, is what it is. As strange as if his right hand had up and run off to get a degree. As unsettling as if his heart was sleeping somewhere on someone else’s pillow, somewhere he couldn’t reach it—couldn’t know that it was okay.</p><p>It’s devastating, not to know.</p><p>So there’s that, but their reunion has none of the uncomplicated emotions of an actual reunion. There’s the fierce-blooded joy of being pressed so close to Sam again—every nerve singing, chest to chest and grappling on the ground, like a key slotting into a lock—everything exactly as it should be. There’s the knee-sagging relief of <em>seeing</em> Sam again, of being able to see with his own two eyes that Sam is alright after the utter horror of having to take it on faith for so long.</p><p>There are all those things, everything he would have expected.</p><p>But there’s the fact of their father’s absence weighing in on Dean’s bones, unforgettable, unforgivable, and pounding in his skull like a migraine. There’s the fact that Sam has grown still more, somehow. Both tall and broad, but also deep—there are parts to Sam he doesn’t know now, and the vertiginous sensation that he’s looking at a stranger makes him somehow nauseous.</p><p>There are things between them now, things that never used to be there.</p><p>It’s alright when they’re moving; it’s kind of horrifying when they stop.</p><p>Their dad was a counterbalance, a weight in the room, a force as sure as any sun. They orbited around him—Dean sure as shit did, but Sam too. John had a personality like that, and anyway, they were his sons. It meant something to Dean, and he refused to believe that deep down, it didn’t mean something to Sammy too. They were blood. They are family.</p><p>Taking Dad out of the equation (missing, lost, <em>gone),</em> throwing him and Sammy right into the thick of it—it makes things fucking awkward.</p><p>“So, uh, how was school?” Dean asks.</p><p>“Fine,” Sam says. Short, clipped. Staring out the window.</p><p>“Did you get good grades?”</p><p>“What am I, twelve?” Sam sighs heavily. “It’s fine, okay? Just stop. Let’s just get this over with.” He mutters that last under his breath like it isn’t really meant for Dean, and Dean can’t help the way it makes his heart clench.</p><p>He cranks up the stereo, pitches his voice to carry above it. “Yeah, yeah, don’t get your panties in a twist, bitch.”</p><p>* * *</p><p>His first reaction to seeing flames licking from the upper floor of Sam’s apartment isn’t a feeling so much as an instinctual compulsion to move. Maybe this particular muscle memory was imbedded in the fiber of his body when he was four. There isn’t time to think. There’s no time to do anything but get Sam out out out.</p><p>Feeling, that comes later, when the block is swarmed with cops and lookie-loos and Sam is bent double with his hands on his knees, coughing and looking bone-pale in the sodium streetlights.</p><p>“Sam.” Dean goes to him, and Sam pushes him away.</p><p>Dean’s first feeling is a bone-deep rush of relief. Sam’s coming with him. Sam has nothing to stay for. Everything is going to be okay.</p><p>Shame is hot on its heels, but that’s nothing new.</p><p>He expects Sam will climb into bed with him that first night. It’s an unconscious belief, one as sure as the knowledge that the sun will rise. Thoughtless, lizard-brain stuff. It doesn’t occur to him that he’s waiting for the warm press of a skinny teenaged body until Sam clicks off the bedside lamp, settling heavily into his own bed on the other side of the room.</p><p>His own bed suddenly feels jeeringly cold.</p><p>Dean doesn’t know why he’d expected it—he hasn’t shared a bed with Sam in years, and that’s something Dean and John never did.</p><p>He turns his head to look at Sam in the other bed. He sees nothing but the heavy, mountainous bulk of a back turned away from him. He thinks he sees it shaking silently, and he turns away, leaving Sammy to his grief.</p><p>There’s something leaden and hard in the pit of his stomach. It tastes bitter when it crawls up to his mouth. Like defeat and failure. He just keeps failing, over and over.</p>
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